Sting-Ray Afternoons

The Impala didn’t come with any add-ons, save a free yardstick bearing the logo of the dealership, Lattof Chevrolet in Arlington Heights, Illinois. For years to come, Mom will use that yardstick to whack us across the ass whenever one of us—The Boys—gets out of line while Dad is out of town, borne to some far corner of the world by another 747, on a mission to sell the planet on Scotch brand eight-track recording tapes.

Lear and Wavering and Muntz were all native Illinoisans who moved elsewhere to give the greatest possible expression to their genius. Al Fritz, inventor of the Sting-Ray, stayed in Illinois—he would die in suburban Chicago at age eighty-eight—and my mother likewise never wanted to leave Chicago for Minnesota, just as she hadn’t wanted to leave her native Cincinnati for Chicago. But Dad had to abandon suburban Chicago for his own genius to fully flourish, and so Mom reluctantly gave the move to Minnesota her blessing.

The Impala slows in the metropolitan traffic east of Minneapolis. On the cusp of that city, on the cusp of a new decade, everything seems suddenly possible. They have put a man on the moon; there is nothing they—which is to say, we—cannot do.

Or so I’ll be told, many times, by Mom and Dad, who today walk into their new house—our new house—in a brand-new subdivision called South Brook, in the burgeoning suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.

Surely this is Tranquility Base. The Impala has landed.





2.





One of These Things

Is Not Like the Others




Shortly after our arrival in Bloomington, Minnesota, I suffer a grand mal seizure—I have no memory of it—and the doctor tells Mom a seizure could recur at any time, especially in strobe lighting, so that I will have a fear of discos later in this decade above and beyond my fear of disco music itself.

The streets of South Brook are gratuitously broad, every one of them a paved Mississippi. A week after my seizure, Mom spots me through the curtains of the family room, motionless on the banks of Southbrook Drive, head at the curb, feet in the yard, flat on my belly.

The screen door bangs. The only other sound is the rainwater running past the curb to the storm drain down the street.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Mom cries. “Steven, are you okay?!”

My right fist holds a long stick. The gap between my front teeth shows when I smile.

“I’m fishing,” I say, eyes still locked on the cut grass and dandelion fuzz floating by.

Mom lifts me to my feet and hugs me to her chest. She smells like Oil of Olay and Tide. I can feel her heart beating inside her blouse.

“Your mother is a worrywart,” Dad occasionally says to me. She worries about the stocks he handpicks from the newspaper, worries that Tom is having too much fun and I am having too little, worries that her boys aren’t eating enough and that we are eating her “out of house and home.”

There is no such thing as a carefree childhood, only a childhood that shifts the burden of care onto someone else. She is that someone else.



Bloomington has two Chinese restaurants: Fong’s on the east side and Wong’s on the west. Its high schools are named for coin-worthy presidents—Lincoln, Jefferson, and Kennedy—and its nine-mile creek is called Nine Mile Creek. Our subdivision, South Brook, is south of that creek, which the developers call a brook. The brook-slash-creek passes near two city parks: Brookside and Creekside. Directly across the brook from South Brook, on the crest of a hill, is Hillcrest Elementary School.

That Bloomington has named all its landmarks with literal-minded haste is a sign of how rapidly it has grown. The city has risen from the prairie at once, fully formed, as if from the pages of a pop-up book. In the early 1950s, Bloomington had 9,902 residents scattered over 38 square miles and not a single traffic light. By 1961, there were more than 50,000 citizens, a Major League Baseball team, and an NFL football team, with an NHL hockey team on the way. Much bigger cities—places people have actually heard of, like Houston, Phoenix, and Miami—don’t have a single team in any of these leagues. They aren’t major-league in the way we now think of ourselves.

By 1970 a family moving to Bloomington from suburban Chicago can plausibly persuade itself that this is a step up to the big leagues. The population has swollen to 81,970, and beginning this year Howard Cosell bestows on every one of us a national legitimacy (and a fourth syllable) over the ABC television network: “To Buh-loom-ing-ton, MINN-uh-soda,” he says while narrating the halftime highlights on Monday Night Football. “To the Icebox! Met-ruh-pol-i-tan Stadium…”

Cosell’s prime-time benediction for Bloomington, bequeathed in a canary-yellow blazer, isn’t our only network-TV validation. Beginning this year, every Saturday night on CBS, in the opening credits of her titular sitcom, Mary Tyler Moore drives pensively up the freeway to her new life in Minneapolis. In doing so, Mary had to pass through Bloomington, her brown eyes taking in our motel on the cloverleaf interchange (called the Cloverleaf Motel), our Ford dealership on the freeway (called Freeway Ford), our bowling alley by the airport (called Airport Bowl), even our racquet and swim club on West 98th Street (called the 98th Street Racquet Swim Club), before throwing her hat in the air on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis.

In subsequent seasons, in the show’s updated title sequence, this virginal Mary will stir confused longing in me as she sloshes a soapy rag across the blue hood of what looks like a life-sized Hot Wheels car while wearing the purple number 10 jersey of Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton, ticking all the boxes of Catholic-school/Bloomington/adolescent erotica. And so Mary Tyler Moore joins Maria from Sesame Street and the illustrated Little Debbie (blue-eyed, red-haired, sun-bonneted beauty on the Little Debbie snack cake boxes) in the pantheon of my early, unrequitable crushes.

Bloomington’s biggest cultural ambassadors by far are the Vikings, regal in purple, who go to the Super Bowl during our very first winter in town. Naturally, they lose—the first of four Super Bowl losses in the 1970s—an act of one-downmanship that is quintessentially Minnesotan. Unlike Chicago, Minneapolis will build its skyscrapers to be just shorter than the tallest building extant, and the state will sacrifice a string of vice presidents and presidential runners-up to the nation, among them Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and perennial presidential candidate Harold Stassen.

The stadium in east Bloomington that serves our metropolis, Metropolitan Stadium, is next door to Metropolitan Sports Center, where the Minnesota North Stars play National Hockey League games bereft of any helmets, if you don’t count their own flowing manes of hockey hair. The North Stars share their arena with the world’s most decadent rock bands, sometimes on the same spring Sunday.

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